SAN FRANCISCO — Lucasfilm and Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) have announced the inaugural Open Source release of the MaterialX Library (www.materialx.org) for computer graphics. MaterialX is an open standard developed by Lucasfilm’s Advanced Development Group and ILM engineers to facilitate the transfer of rich materials and look-development content between applications and renderers.
Companies such as Autodesk and Foundry have already voiced support for MaterialX.
"Autodesk is very pleased to be a contributor to the MaterialX project and we are looking forward to adding native support for MaterialX workflows to our digital content creation tools,” says Chris Vienneau, director of media and entertainment at Autodesk. “As with other open formats, MaterialX is going to improve collaboration and help make production pipelines more efficient, so we are thankful that Lucasfilm have chosen to share their technology with the community through open source software."
"Foundry is happy to see the MaterialX project reach this latest milestone,” adds Jordan Thistlewood, senior product manager: look development and lighting at Foundry. “The possibilities for smoothing the transfer of look development information between our own applications is exciting. The broader principle of open source projects and multi-vendor data exchange are important for the industry as a whole. Thus we look forward to including MaterialX powered work0lows in future releases of our applications."
Originated at Lucasfilm in 2012, MaterialX has been used by ILM in feature films such as Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, and realtime immersive experiences such as Trials On Tatooine. The MaterialX team will host a Birds of a Feather meeting at the ACM SIGGRAPH Conference in Los Angeles on Monday July 31st from 9:30am-11:00am, in room 511BC of the Los Angeles Convention Center.